Facebook is in hot water these days, as their lies unravel. Maybe—hopefully—this leads to their shutdown, and even to new privacy laws in the US like the EU's GDPR. But one problem occurs to me: We need a GDPR equivalent before Facebook dies.

Picture the alternative. Facebook is hemorrhaging users (to where, I don't know) because people have finally gotten fed up enough to explore the alternatives that have existed all along. Maybe some of the alternatives are even more ethical than Facebook. So far, so good. Facebook stock crashes, advertisers put their money elsewhere. Facebook's investors start knocking at the door: Where's their money?

There are few ways a dying Facebook could pay back their investors, and none of them are good. Outright selling the user data (rather than giving it away for favors, as we now know they have done.) And regardless of how poorly Facebook treats its users, I'm not willing to bet that Facebook is the worst possible holder of such detailed and sensitive user information.

I think the best scenario we can hope for is that GDPR gets adopted by the US with minimal changes, turning the screws on Facebook until it becomes valueless and the user data becomes toxic in the eyes of possible buyers. The investors lose their money, as well they should.

One can hope.

Author

Tim McCormack lives in Somerville, MA, USA and works as a software developer. (Updated 2019.)